By Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim

Is China a Neocolonial Power in Africa?

China-bashing
has predictably reemerged as a familiar theme in the current 2016 US presidential
campaign, with the frontrunners of both parties attacking China for having
committed a myriad of alleged outrages against US interests (Anderlini, 2016;
“Clinton slams China,” 2016). Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, is
of special interest, as she had prominently accused China of engaging in
neocolonialism in Africa during her 2011 visit to Zambia in her position at the
time as US Secretary of State (Krause-Jackson, 2011). The Chinese have not
forgotten this slight, and the state-owned Xinhua news agency recently
published an opinion piece critiquing Clinton’s accusation of China’s alleged
neocolonialism, concluding that:

“Accusing China of
being a neo-colonialist in Africa puts the biased West in an absurd scenario
where the robber acts like the cop.”(“Who’s Africa's,”
2016)

As
I recounted last year, China has indeed been very active with its various
economic projects in Africa. To briefly recap: “Recent examples of such
projects include China Railway Group’s Light Railway in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
the first phase of which was recently completed; China Railway Construction
Corporation’s Abuja-Kaduna railway in Nigeria, which was completed in December
2014, and which is the first phase of a larger railway modernization project
connecting Lagos with Kano; and the Lobito-Luau railway in Angola, also built
by China Railway Construction Corporation, which will eventually be connected
to the Angola-Zambia and the Tanzania-Zambia railways. Likewise, Chinese
engineering firms ... are constructing airports across the continent, including
airports in Angola, Comoros, Djibouti, Gabon, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania,
and Togo. Apart from the transportation sector, Chinese companies are also
involved in Africa’s energy sector, including hydropower dams in Ethiopia and
Uganda; biogas development in Guinea, Sudan and Tunisia; and solar and wind
power plants in Ethiopia, Morocco, and South Africa. Other economic sectors
Chinese companies are actively involved with in Africa include agriculture,
construction, healthcare, mining, and industrial manufacturing. A recent count
estimates over 2,000 Chinese companies are engaged across almost every country
on the African continent” (Lim, 2015).

Does
this intense level of economic engagement count as neocolonialism? Gordon
observes that the relationship of neocolonialism is one of “political-economic
domination” such that “there is no viable cultural, economic, or military
opposition to the hegemonic weight of the current ‘world order.’” The world
order today is Euro-American, and its hegemony was won through not just the
collapse of the Soviet Union and its socialist satellites at the end of the
Cold War, but also the “years of successful political, economic, and military
destabilization of Third World sites of resistance” (Gordon, 1997, p. 242).
Such efforts at destabilization continue in our contemporary era, as can be
seen in the 2011 Western intervention against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya,
which in turn led to the strengthening of African jihadi groups such as Al-Qaeda
in the Islamic Maghreb and Boko Haram, and which in turn has led the US to establish
a network of secret military bases across the African continent to fight its
War on Terror (Kuperman, 2015; Turse, 2015; Lim, 2016).

Mason
(2013) reminds us of Hu Jintao’s 2006 pledge to double China’s development aid
to Africa, and of the subsequent surge in Chinese investment in infrastructure
construction on the continent. Indeed, Chinese aid is more attractive for
African governments compared to that offered by the West as it famously comes
without the preconditions for political or economic reforms usually imposed by
Western donors (p. 250). Memories of the painful experience during the 1980s across
Africa of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) and the World Bank’s
structural adjustment policies loom over the Nigerian government’s recent
decision to seek infrastructure loans from the Chinese government rather than the
IMF (Lim, 2014, pp. 86-89; Aderinokun & Amanze-Nwachuku, 2016; Fick, 2016).
Such memories echo Sartre’s (2001) warning that neocolonial efforts to
emphasize the economic benefits accruing from colonial reforms are in fact
intended to disguise the reality of political domination (p. 9). Indeed, development
aid from China has allowed developing countries such as Cambodia to avoid having
to adjust their political and economic orders to satisfy the demands of Western
donors (Lim, 2013, p. 39).

Mason
(2013) suggests that the increased Chinese emigration to Africa that has
accompanied the increase in Sino-African economic engagement mirrors the “white
settlement and rule in Africa” that occurred during the colonial era, and focuses
in particular on the economic impact of Chinese merchants in Africa, who “sell
goods made in China,” as well as that of their African counterparts who travel
to markets in Guangzhou and elsewhere in China to purchase goods for sale back in
African markets (p. 250). This influx of cheap goods from China has been known
to “drive out traditional suppliers” and “undermine the local economy” (Halper,
2010, p. 98). Dixon (2014) notes that the removal of trade barriers following
Nigeria’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 1995 led to a flood of
imported goods from China, and this in turn led to mass closures of local
factories that were unable to compete with the cheaper Chinese products. The
resulting deindustrialization of northern Nigeria laid the economic conditions
for the rise of the Boko Haram insurgency which still afflicts the region
today. However, this by no means represents the inevitable outcome of local
industries in Africa confronting global competition. Brautigam cites examples
of local African entrepreneurs in countries like Kenya, Lesotho, and Madagascar
who were able to successfully compete against Chinese and other foreign
imports, in some cases thanks to the human resource development and technology
transfer provided by Chinese industrial investment in their countries
(Brautigam, 2009, pp. 219-223).

The increased Chinese emigration to Africa that has accompanied the increase in Sino-African economic engagement mirrors the “white settlement and rule in Africa” that occurred during the colonial era.

A
related claim that is commonly presented in the media about China’s alleged
neocolonial exploitation of Africa is that China and its firms have been
engaged in a massive land grab on the continent. In Brautigam’s calculation, if
all these media reports were accurate, Chinese companies would own 6 million
hectares, or 1 percent of Africa’s total arable land. However, the actual
figure is closer to just 240,000 hectares. As she explains: “Discouraged by
poor infrastructure, political instability, and the sober realization that
profits were likely to prove more elusive than hoped, Chinese firms came,
explored, and then often went elsewhere — most often to countries in China’s
border regions: Russia, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia” (Brautigam, 2015, p.
153).

The
small actual size of Chinese-owned farmland in Africa also disconfirms related
accusations of China’s alleged neocolonial plot to transform Africa into a farm
to feed the hungry masses back home in China. Recent trade data shows that
China is currently importing most of its food commodities like maize and
soybeans from major non-African agricultural exporters like the US and Brazil. Indeed,
the development of Africa’s food producers into major global food exporters will
require significant investment in agricultural modernization, which means the
countries concerned will have to do more to attract much-needed investment from
international agricultural firms like those of China (Brautigam, 2015, p. 157).

With
regard to journalists and researchers repeating false claims about China’s agricultural
activities in Africa, similar examples can be found in reports of Chinese loans
to African states. A 2011 report from Fitch Ratings calculated that loans issued
to Sub-Saharan African states between 2001-2010 from the Export-Import Bank of
China amounted to USD 67.2 billion, “overtaking World Bank lending of USD 54.7 bn
to Africa for the same period.” This claim would subsequently be repeated
elsewhere. Mason (2013), for example, repeats the claim that Chinese aid to
Africa exceeded that of the World Bank (p. 250). The suggestion that China has
been inundating Africa with cheap money has various implications, including the
neocolonial image of China purchasing influence from impoverished African
governments. However, the Fitch claim is wrong. A recent study of Chinese loans
to Africa from Johns Hopkins University’s China Africa Research Initiative (CARI)
shows that a more accurate estimate of Chinese loans to Africa during 2001-2010
would be USD 30.5 billion, or less than half of Fitch’s estimate. Indeed,
China’s growing pledges of development aid, including concessional loans,
should be differentiated from the loans that are actually agreed upon and
accepted, especially since a “growing number of countries … have suspended or
canceled Chinese offers of credit lines” (Hwang, Brautigam & Eom, 2016, p.
3). As the authors of the CARI report recount of their analysis:

“Of the 1,223
reports of Chinese loan financing that we analyzed, only 56% actually
materialized and are being used. The rest turned out to be mistakes, hopes,
rumors, cancelled, or real loans—but not from China.”(Hwang, Brautigam
& Eom, 2016, p. 1)

Looking
beyond Africa, this trend of misreporting China’s global activities is most
glaringly seen in alarmist reports of China’s alleged attempts to subvert the
existing Euro-American world order by creating a parallel constellation of
international institutions (Heilmann, Rudolf, Huotari & Buckow, 2014). In
the case of the new international financial institutions (IFIs) set up by
China, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the New
Development Bank (NDB) set up by China with its BRICS partners, China has
always asserted that these are intended to supplement rather than replace the
existing constellation of IFIs (Talley, 2015). Indeed, the modest nature of the
first projects to be funded by the AIIB and the NDB confirms that this is the
case (Panda, 2016; “BRICS bank approves,” 2016). Beyond the shores of Africa,
China is also not exhibiting the behavior of an aspirational neocolonial power.

About The Author

Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a research fellow with International Public Policy Pte. Ltd. (IPP), and is the author of Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics (Routledge 2013). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has taught at Pannasastra University of Cambodia and the American University of Nigeria. Prior to joining IPP, he was a research fellow with the Longus Institute for Development and Strategy.